Language Acquisition Steven Pinker Massachusetts Institute of Technology Chapter to appear in L. R. Gleitman, M. Liberman, and D. N. Osherson (Eds.

), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd Ed. Volume 1: Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. NONFINAL VERSION: PLEASE DO NOTE QUOTE. Preparation of the chapter was supported by NIH grant HD 18381 and NSF grant BNS 91-09766, and by the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. 1 Introduction Language acquisition is one of the central topics in cognitive science.all normal humans speak, no nonhuman animal does. Language is the main vehicle by which we know about other people's thoughts, and the two must be intimately related. so the facts of language structure are easy to come by; these data hint at a system of extraordinary complexity.Language acquisition is not only inherently interesting; studying it is one way to look for concrete answers to questions that permeate cognitive science: 2 The Biology of Language Acquisition Human language is made possible by special adaptations of the human mind and body that occurred in the course of human evolution, and which are put to use by children in acquiring their mother tongue. A. Evolution of Language B. Dissociations between Language and General Intelligence C. Maturation of the Language System 3 The Course of Language Acquisition the chapter by Werker shows, language acquisition begins very early in the human lifespan, and begins, logically enough, with the acquisition of a language's sound patterns. 4 Explaining Language Acquisition Many other small effects have been documented where changes in information processing abilities affect language development. For example, children selectively pick up information at the ends of words (Slobin, 1973), and at the beginnings and ends of sentences (Newport, et al, 1977), 5 What is Learned To understand how X is learned, you first have to understand what X is. Linguistic theory is thus an essential part of the study of language acquisition (see the Chapter by Lasnik). Linguistic research tries do three things. 6 What and When Children Learn

People do not reproduce their parents' language exactly. If they did, we would all still be speaking like Chaucer. But in any generation, in most times, the differences between parents' language and the one their children ultimately acquire is small. 7 Acquisition in Action What do all these arguments mean for what goes on in a child's mind moment by moment as he or she is acquiring rules from parental speech? Let's look at the process as concretely as possible. A. Bootstrapping the First Rules The rules and dictionary entries can be peeled off the tree: S --> NP VP NP --> (det) (A) N VP --> V NP dog: N ice cream: N ate: V; eater = subject, thing eaten = object the: det big: A B. The Organization of Grammar as a Guide to Acquisition A striking discovery of modern generative grammar is that natural languages seem to be built on the same basic plan. 8 Conclusion The topic of language acquisition implicate the most profound questions about our understanding of the human mind, and its subject matter, the speech of children, is endlessly fascinating.

9 Further Reading There is a chapter on language acquisition, and chapters on syntactic structure, word structure, universals and change, prescriptive grammar, neurology and genetics, and other topics. 10 Problems "Negative evidence" is reliable information available to a language learner about which strings of words are ungrammatical in the language to be acquired. Which of the following would, and would not, count as negative evidence. Justify your answers. References Anderson, J. (1977) Induction of augmented transition networks. Cognitive Science, 1, 125-157. Bates, E. (1989) Functionalism and the competition model. In B. MacWhinney and E. Bates (Eds.), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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